Making the best HQ youtube movies?

I've made some great video clips I'd like to post on youtube in HQ format.
There are some guidelines available to encode videos in such a way youtube will show them in high quality. (like this one for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtTNE61iik )

I watched that video and the interesting thing mentioned was, if the vertical size was a particular size or bigger, YT would encode both a regular quality and a higher quality video. That is good information to know.

As for your Mac, I wrote a "Preparing Video for YouTube" guide that may be helpful. The short answer is that there is no single formula.

Keep in mind that there are other free services that deliver much better quality, even true 720p HD. See this Macworld article.

I experimented a bit more today and I found the x264 codec working pretty good ( http://developer.berlios.de/projects/x264qtcodec/ ).
I encoded my movies with quicktime pro, with the following settings, all of them showed the HQ option (after a couple of hours):